Seriously though, it’s easier for to focus on only a couple of classes at a time. We find that way we are more in sync on the direction of the class and its problems. We don’t work in an environment where each person goes to their desk, throws in the talents for one class, and then we pour them all into the game. A lot of the time it’s 10% actual talent implementation and 90% brainstorming and discussion.

Bloat: Bloat is another word for „I can’t have everything I want!“. We want every class to feel their tree is „bloated“ to a degree. We want classes to have to make choices and sacrifices over good talents, because that is ultimately what makes talents interesting. If it weren’t that way, we would just make it a linear progression without any choices. That said, if you feel the flow of the talents makes you spend points in something that doesn’t necessarily benefit you what that build is for (i.e. spending too many „PvE“ talents for a PvP build), then that can be addressed.

We are adding a new class to Lich King, as well as improving the raid viability of specs such as Arcane mage, Survival hunter and Balance druid. That means you have 30 available specs for 25 slots. There are two ways to design around this problem. One is that there are 25 mandatory specs and 5 that shouldn’t be raiding. Boo. A more fun, interesting and ultimately fair direction is that you actually have some choices in who to bring. Imagine running a raid with no warrior tanks at all. 🙂

Druids are not all done and ready for live. We need to „really look“ at druids before ship. As I have posted in other forums though, we don’t generally look at all classes all at once. We work very collaboratively, which unfortunately means classes get appraised one at a time.

As far as gimmick fights, in order to have four viable tank classes, we’re just going to have to avoid that kind of encounter. We hope we can do so without making every boss fight feel too similar. We have no problem if paladins are better at some bosses than others, so long as a guild that runs with a druid MT isn’t months behind the paladin MT guild because the encounter is so hard without the paladin.

We’re not entirely happy with the way the Feral ended up in BC. The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were something you wanted to bring if you weren’t the kind of guild that swapped different people out for every boss. But I don’t think „convenience factor“ is ultimately a great value to bring to a raid. The problem was we were kind of stuck because if we made Ferals end-game tanks and amazing melee, then the rogues were screwed, because they couldn’t go respec to tank or heal.

I do think the Feral flexibility will still count for something, as will unique abilities like Innervate. But we’d like the Raid of the Future ™ to be one where you need various roles filled, but have options for how to fill them. Ferals can fill tank roles or melee roles (or both!) and can also supply the X raid buff. It would be nice if every spec of every class could bring a version of some raid buff.

A DK of any spec should be able to tank a 5-player non-heroic instance. The same is true for a warrior, and perhaps even a paladin or druid, though those are a little tricky since the gear overlaps different roles even less.

A warrior pretty much cannot tank a raid (unless he massively overgears it) without a heavy investment in the Protection tree. The difference is the DK can go into the Blood, Frost or Unholy tree and still tank. But she probably needs as many tanking talents as she can get (which does not have to mean the same number of talents that other classes spend), and definitely needs the tanking gear and player skill that go along with raiding.

It’s great to see people fine tuning DK specs, but our view on tanking specs for DKs is that there should be many of them, none being particularly more powerful than any other if the goal is simply to tank an instance. We’re wanting any death knight to tank, as long as they’ve actually spent their talent points somewhere and they have at least average gear. So you can be frost, you can be unholy, or blood and still be able to tank: the class is a tanking class and no specific tree is intended to be particularly more suitable for tanking than the others. So unlike other tanking-able classes, you won’t have to heavily invest in any particular tree.

A Brief History of Degeneration I believe the initial version of Degeneration described at the World Wide Invitational was that it removed all hots on the target and did extra damage per hot, and the dot effect of Degen also prevented any additional hots. Wow. While this might sound fun (for the death knight) it was probably ridiculously overpowered, and very punitive towards one type of healer in particular. If you think druids are OP in Arenas, this was probably not the best way to fix that.

Yes, we have done some toning down of Lifebloom. Lifebloom was unintentionally buffed too much during Burning Crusade when we made the coefficient scaling work on the stack applications. This has caused a lot of problems with balance in the game. Druids are intended — as healers — to be able to dish out good throughput heals with very low efficiency, likewise Lifebloom is intended to be rather cheap and efficient, but not to the degree that it is today.

Compare how you healed in dungeons and raids pre-Burning Crusade to today. Before you used nearly every healing spell you had, today you just use Lifebloom and maybe your other HoTs just because they stack with Lifebloom. Not only is this boring to the player, but it pigeon holes the Druid to spamming Lifebloom on the tanks. […]

Just as a note — we did intend to change Lifebloom in the Burning Crusade (lower the coefficent), but we ended up delaying that so that we wouldn’t hurt the Druids viability in raiding. With Wrath, we’re introducing a new heal, a revamped Tree Form, and other mechanics to correctly balance things out

7) Because death knights need to spend so few talents on tanking relative to warriors or paladins who spend a great chunk of talents on tanking, it’s not fair. Ghostcrawler: This is a valid concern. First, I’m not sure the numbers are all that different. Second, gear and skill probably have a much bigger impact on tanking effectiveness than spec. Third, a lot of a warrior’s best tanking abilities are core to the class, though talents definitely help (and a few talents help enormously). Fourth, and most important, it doesn’t seem like smart design to keep designing trees in such a way that chase off tanks.

That’s a pretty controversial statement, so I should elaborate. We don’t know for sure that the Prot tree scares off tanks. A lot of you adore tanking just as it is, thank you, and I’m not trying to tell you you’re wrong. (I’ve tanked for years and I still love it.) There are some things that aren’t fun about tanking that have nothing to do with the prot trees: inability to solo, stress at wiping the raid, stress at often having to lead and mark, stress at having to play every night lest your friends have to cancel the run, etc.

On the other hand, we do think the prot trees (and even Feral) could use some improvement, and you’ve seen a lot of those changes already. Starting over with a class‘ talents would be a lot of work and probably really anger players, so that isn’t terribly attractive. But here is a new class without a lot of baggage, and a chance to try something different with the talent trees. Clearly a lot of people are excited about it, so maybe we’re onto something. If it isn’t your thing, that’s cool. But make that decision for aesthetic or other reasons, not because you’re convinced DKs will be bad tanks. Unconventional doesn’t need to mean inferior.

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